Category: Technology

Using Google Fonts on your site is a privacy problem because it allows Google to track your visitors even if you don’t use any other Google APIs or services. Why did you think Google so generously lets you use those fonts for free?

The tool seems to rather smoothly calculate curves between the stop points you configure

To prevent the clicking noise when the fan engages, I set it to run at 35% RPM even as a baseline, and not ramp up until the GPU hits 60 degrees. At this setting, I can’t hear the fans during desktop use; goal accomplished.

There’s a reason for the very specific title: It seems this feature is configured a little differently on Tumbleweed than on openSUSE Leap and I haven’t found any up-to-date information on this. So I’m writing this down as a note to myself.

A default Plasma desktop will use kwallet to save passwords for various desktop services (802.11x passwords, Nextcloud/ownCloud logins, SSH key passphrases, etc.). This can get inconvenient when e.g. Nextcloud wants to access the Internet, but the wallet isn’t unlocked yet, so Plasma can’t decrypt the WLAN PSK.

One solution is to:

Make your kwallet password the same as your user password

Ensure kwallet’s default wallet is called “kwallet” and that it’s the one that contains the keys you want unlocked on login

Make sure this wallet is using Blowfish encryption (this will not work in gnupg mode)

Install the require PAM modules

The package on openSUSE Tumbleweed is “pam_kwallet”, so:

sudo zypper in pam_kwallet

Log out from your desktop session, log back in and it should immediately work. In the past, you would have had to add the pam modules to /etc/pam.d/common-session or /etc/pam.d/sddm,but this is now done automatically.

The elegance of this is that you can still store more precious passwords in a separate wallet in Wallet Manager (just call that one something other than “kwallet”). That wallet can then be set to decrypt only on demand. This should save a lot of passphrase typing on a typical day.

Update, 2020-04-29: Since upgrading to kernel 5.6.6 and Mesa 20.0.4 I haven’t had any GPU resets anymore even without this workaround. It seems the reclocking issue is fixed. Keeping the article for reference:

If you have an AMD Vega 56 or 64 you may have had some issues using the amdgpu driver, namely random GPU resets leaving you with a blank or colored screen and freezing the computer after a few minutes. It seems that too aggressive memory reclocking is the culprit, but I found a solution in the Freedesktop issue list on their GitLab instance:

Stick this in your systemd, e.g. to /etc/systemd/system/amdgpu-pp.service:

When I got all fancy and moved to the 5.x kernel and Pulseaudio 12.2, I had one big new problem: My sound card would make an ugly popping noise every time it started playing sound again. Very, very 90s.

Fortunately, this can be fixed. Thanks to hateball for this solution. Stick this in your ~/.config/pulse/default.pa:

I’ve been trying SUSE as my main distribution and that’s something that hasn’t happened in my life since 1996. Even worse, this distro impressed me, a hardcore Debian nerd, quite a lot.

The reason for distro-hopping is Canonical’s bold decision to drop support for using 32-bit executables (and libraries) in Ubuntu starting as early as October 2019. That means that potentially thousands of games will no longer work, and it prompted Valve to drop support for Ubuntu in Steam. Valve is arguably the most important contributor to Linux gaming, so this is a big deal and a good enough reason to look at distros other than Ubuntu.

If you’re forced to use newer and more bizarre USB wifi sticks that rely on the rtl8812au/rtl8814au chipset, you need to do two things:

Compile the driver yourself, since most distros don’t include one

Tell NetworkManager to stop randomizing MAC addresses for that device

You can get the updated source from diederikdehaas’ project on GitHub. The build instructions there are great and the driver integrates with DKMS. However, you won’t be able to connect because NetworkManager is scrambling your MAC address. To make it stop, add this to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf:

[device]
wifi.scan-rand-mac-address=no

And restart NetworkManager (systemctl restart NetworkManager on e.g. Debian 9). With MAC scrambling enabled, the interface came up for me but failed to authenticate.

I can’t remember where I found this, I’m pretty sure I didn’t figure this out for myself. If you need a DolphinBar, Aliexpress should have you covered. It could be that the vendor code differs for yours, so make sure to watch dmesg when you plug it in.

Since I distrust centralized services such as Spotify that can delete content you love at any time they like, I’ve always bought my own music and have a huge collection. But there’s no denying that streaming music to any device or location is a useful feature. You still don’t need Spotify for that, thanks to the FOSS community you can build your own Spotify-like streaming system, and this guide shows one combination of software to accomplish this.

The goal: Stream your music collection from your own PC (or NAS or whatever storage you have) to any web browser, mobile phone and desktop clients.

So the proprietary Nvidia driver is a large, steaming, smelly pile of shit. At least that’s the impression you get when you read what developers say about it. There’s a bug here and a workaround there, and we haven’t even started talking about the messy situation that is EGLstreams yet. So why do people use Nvidia cards on Linux? Because so far, they give good bang for the buck, use relatively little energy for what they do and work with all commercial games. I’m pretty sure those are the reasons, anyway.

But Nvidia at least on Plasma/KDE has some serious problems with tearing and stutter — I have three Nvidia setups and they all are unsatisfying out of the box. If you use ForceCompositionPipeline like I recommended earlier, you will probably run into stutter issues. But I think I found the perfect setup now, stutter-free and tearing-free for desktop use as well as perfect for gaming.

There are two alternatives:

Method 1: Solve it by switching the GL yield mechanism to USLEEP

Add the following to ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/kwin.sh:

#!/bin/sh
export __GL_YIELD="usleep"

Thank mahenou on Steam for suggesting I try this again. The first time I did, it was probably too late in the environment for Kwin to pick it up. It’s important that the var is set when Kwin initializes.

Method 2: Solve it by forcing triple buffering

Add the following to ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/kwin.sh:

#!/bin/sh
export KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1

And chmod +x the file. Then add the following to an Xorg config snippet, for example /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf:

Finally, enable compositing and vsync

Then make sure you have compositing enabled in System Settings -> Display and Monitor -> Compositor. If you are very doubtful, do a restart. After that you should have a perfect, tear-free and stutter-free desktop experience. I had to disable compositing manually with Alt-Shift-F12 before starting games with the triple buffering method. This was unnecessary with the __GL_YIELD method.

I can’t truthfully explain why this works, but I know it works around a bunch of bugs and unexpected default settings in the Nvidia driver. Also, Kwin is now able to compute the right timings and handle triple buffering instead of rendering half-finished frames like a fucking moron when it still believed Nvidia was doing triple buffering by default.

For me this has been wonderful. The desktop is smooth as if I were using a proper graphics card like an AMD RX 580 with Mesa. Games run exceedingly well, and there is no stutter or delay like with ForceCompositionPipeline. Not even in videos. It’s all just perfect.

This is a mix of hints received from several people on Reddit and Steam that I unfortunately forgot the names of, as well as info from the Arch Linux wiki. I’d like to thank all these people for their knowledge.